Cheating Starts Before the Race Does

Why does the Boston Marathon make it so hard to enter? And how often do runners sneak in by trading or buying one another’s entries?

THE eBay entry was so brazen it almost seemed like a joke: “2008 Boston Marathon entry on the FRONT ROW Must See!!”

Someone was selling a coveted starting place for the Boston Marathon. And this person claimed to have run a marathon in the impressive time of 2 hours 30 minutes, not only earning a place in the Boston Marathon — which requires nearly all runners to meet a tough qualifying time — but guaranteeing a spot near the starting line, where the quickest line up.

There was a problem with this eBay auction. It was against the rules.

The Boston Marathon requires athletes to have run a marathon in the past year with a time that is adjusted for age and gender. Most find the race’s strict standards all but impossible to meet. All this helps make the Boston Marathon unique and makes running it a dream for many athletes.

It also raises two questions: Why does the Boston Marathon make it so hard to enter? And how often do runners sneak in by trading or buying one another’s entries?

People try to cheat to get into the Boston Marathon every year, said Marc Chalufour, a spokesman for the Boston Athletic Association, which sponsors the race. And this year’s race, which was run on Monday, was no exception. The B.A.A. finds cheaters by checking sites like eBay and Craigslist, and hopes that if it misses some, other runners will turn in any cheaters.

That last situation is more likely, as the eBay seller must have learned. The offer was quickly removed from the site, but not before the person was exposed and publicly excoriated on running message boards.

Most marathons take all comers, but big-city marathons, which attract huge crowds, often have systems to limit the field. Nothing, though, matches the Boston system.

To enter the New York City Marathon, for example, runners must take part in a lottery. The only way to bypass this process is to run for a charity; be a member of New York Road Runners, volunteer with the group, and run nine of its races; or be very fast. Very fast means meeting qualifying times that are stricter than those of the Boston Marathon. Richard Finn, a spokesman for the New York Road Runners, explained that the qualifying times are the group’s way of attracting the quick-footed without “leaving it up to luck.”

The marathon in Chicago has a system to accept extraordinarily fast runners, but takes every applicant until it meets its limit.

With Boston, though, you either meet the qualifying time, illegally sneak in or gain entry as a charity runner — only 1,275 of 25,000 in the race ran for nonprofit groups like the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training.

The reason for the qualifying times, Mr. Chalufour said, is the peculiar logistics of that race. The Boston Marathon is the only big-city marathon that starts on a narrow road in a small town, Hopkinton, Mass. There is just not room for a huge field.

Qualifying times emerged in the late 1970’s when the running boom was starting and the Boston Marathon became overwhelmed with applicants.

But soon the byproduct became the goal. There are runners who have spent decades as marathoners trying in vain to qualify for the Boston Marathon. There are marathons that have become popular largely because of their flat or, in the case of Steamtown Marathon in northeastern Pennsylvania, largely downhill courses allow contestants to run fast times, increasing their chances of qualifying for the Boston Marathon.

The qualifying times for the Boston Marathon are not a result of a scientific analysis, though they evolved. At first, there was no effort to ensure equal opportunities for runners of different ages. The original standards, in 1976, specified that men had to have run a marathon in the preceding year in three hours or less. For women, it was 3:30.

By 1980, the B.A.A. made allowances for age, acknowledging that it was a lot harder for older runners to meet those times than it was for people in their 20s and 30s. Before that change, Mr. Chalufour said, masters runners (40 and older) were mostly shut out. If you were a masters runner, “you had to be relatively one of the best in the world,” to make it into the Boston Marathon, he said.

Now, there is a progression of qualifying times with a goal of limiting the field to 25,000 runners. Even so, the association had to close its registration in late February this year — the first time it had to do that — when 25,000 qualified runners had entered.

In order to deduce how many marathoners could have qualified in 2006 and 2007, Jim Fortner, 69, a runner from Pasadena, Md., analyzed published statistics on marathons in the United States (mysite.verizon.net/jim2wr/id202.html). He limited himself to certified marathon courses that enabled runners to qualify for Boston if they ran fast enough.

The analysis included more than 740,000 marathon times and included more than 90 percent of marathon finishers in those two years. Only about 10 percent of those runners had times that were good enough for Boston. (Twenty-two percent of the runners in the Steamtown Marathon qualified.)

Of course, the very difficulty of qualifying for the Boston Marathon explains part of the appeal of sneaking in. But these days, unless a runner privately offers an entry to a friend — and some do — the runner takes a real chance of being outed.

Entries on a message board at one running site, LetsRun.com, turned catching that eBay seller into a blood sport. Although Mr. Chalufour said that “at this time, we don’t know if the eBay seller was indeed the person who was reported on the Internet,” the participants on the message board seemed certain they had their man.

One wrote: “Anyways, if this isn’t an April Fools’ Joke (auction started on 3/30 though) this guy ain’t that smart.” The writer added that he found the runner in “about 20 seconds” because there are not many runners with times of 2:30 and the runner’s auction location was Columbus, Ohio. He named the suspect, and concluded, “Hey, it’s only at $20.22 right now. It’s a bargain.” (The offers soon soared to $500.)

“Good work, detective Colombo,” wrote the next person posting a message, adding that the B.A.A. would not be happy.

Others posted photos of the suspect from a running club newsletter and from his eBay profile. Others said they had notified the association.

Still others stood up for the eBay seller. “Wow, you guys are AWESOME. Glad you have nothing better to do than rat this guy out to the B.A.A.,” one defender wrote.

Others thought that whoever bought that entry would be in big trouble. “About 2 weeks after the race we will be able to type in the bib # on the Boston Photo Website and SEE who this actually is!!” one person wrote. “We can then totally trash this guy for a couple weeks!!!!! God help the guy who buys this bib!! Ha Ha Ha.”

Another disincentive for bib sellers would be a final result that would be a blow to their egos.

“I sold my ’04 Boston Bib for $550 on eBay; not as easy nowadays,” a person wrote on LetsRun.com.

But, the runner concluded, “I’m the one that had my 5:50 time posted in the local paper.”

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